FYI: 849 EUR (~$910 USD) incl 19% tax for the basic configuration with AMD Ryzen 5 7535U, 8GB RAM, and 500GB SSD storage.
$799.00 USD gets you the Mac mini with the same (maybe faster?) RAM and (slightly faster) SSD.
And it very comfortably beats the 7535U while consuming less energy & staying cooler.
Definitely a deal breaker [M2 Mac mini] for Windows x86 dependant workflows; not so much for Linux users tho.
I think AMD is the only one with a real chance at matching and maybe beating Apple in the mini PC space, but pricing and architectural differences still make it really challenging.
Yeah. I saw the Mac mini in a store not long ago. I don’t know about the state of Linux support for the M2 platform. I somewhat dislike Apple for nowadays soldering everything and making things so they can’t be updated or repaired. And they take a crazy amount of extra money to put in a proper amount of RAM and storage. Like Apple’s price explodes from 700€ to ~2000€ once I put in 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.
I agree that the Tuxedo Nano Pro is very expensive, but the Mac Mini is much more expensive. When you look at the comparable, German prices, it looks like this:
- 8GB/512GB: 849€ vs 929€
- 16GB/1TB: 924€ vs 1389€
- 32GB/2TB: 1044€ vs 2079€ (24 GB only)
The minimum config prices from Apple look quite good, but they fleece you for the RAM and SSD capacity. And of course you can’t upgrade them on your own. And of course the Mac Mini doesn’t support Linux (maybe Asahi Linux will get there in a few years, but Apple certainly isn’t helping).
And the specs would be ridiculously different.
I’d say you need to buy at least 4 of the Odroids and run them in parallel to compete with the performance of that ryzen.
You can get a Ryzen 7 mini PC on Amazon for $360. With Windows, but Linux runs fine on it.
The one I linked has a WiFi/BT card that I could not get running, but the Ryzen 5 version worked OOTB no issues.
I know you were only replying to the comment above about ODroid, and I agree with what you said. I also have several ODroids, and I have learned to dislike Linux on ARM. I have one U3 that will not power on, at the moment, so I’m a bit sour on ODroids.
Given the existence of the Trigkey offerings, what justifies the $900 price on the OP machine, do you think?
